There’s a bit of a puzzle in American Antiquity recently, a section of reviews of pseudoarchaeology books and after reading it, the biggest mystery is why?
Donald H. Holly Jr is worried that people are taking Giorgio Tsoukalos, of Ancient Aliens, seriously. He introduces the section with a call to engage with pseudoarchaeology, on the grounds that ignoring it doesn’t seem to do anything, with a skim of the Amazon best-sellers as evidence. There then follows a series of reviews in which intelligent archaeologists repeat variations of “Isn’t this awful! Ugh!” I’ve not heard of a few of the books in the section, but the ones I have heard of are pretty dreadful but is this engaging with the books? For example if you gave an archaeologist a copy of Delia Smith’s How to Cook, would it be reasonable to lament the lack of citations, or academic language? Anyone who’s read it will know that she’s useless at covering the Bronze Age / Iron Age transition. But then anyone who’s read will also know that’s not the point of the book.
In a similar way most of these books are not serious attempts at either scholarly debate or even anything beyond a tale. As it happens the tales themselves are pretty ropey. Graham Hancock hold out hope of an ancient civilisation whose secret wisdom we can unlock if we can decode their message from the past. I don’t know what wisdom’s on offer, but it doesn’t appear to include when sea levels rise, move inland. Hence the rise in sea levels at the end of the Ice Age wiped them out because they were very successful and very wise, but very incapable of moving from the beach. But what it does do is provide a series of nice locations for the Ancient World’s Greatest Hits, and offer the reader some kind of connection to them.
But if we assume there is a point to an archaeological review of the books then it was still puzzling me. Fingerprints of the Gods is twenty years old. Do archaeologists really need a review of it now? I wondered if there was even a public need. I suppose there might be because while the books reviewed are often rather old, they still could be new to someone just discovering them. But do reviews in American Antiquity help the public?
At the moment the reviews are freely accessible, though you’d have to be a pretty odd member of the public to find that out as I haven’t seen anything telling anyone. The audience for these reviews are archaeologists. You can see them as a member of the public, unlike most of the content where you’d be excluded, but this isn’t really produced for anyone outside academia.
The impression of many of the reviews is of social positioning. He finds pseudoarchaeology implausible, you find it impossible, but I find it dishonest, racist and offensive, so by social rules my archaeological standards are higher than everyone else’s and I win. It’s an effect you can see on Twitter when people try to outbid each other for outrage over a public event.
…and if I leave it here then this review here then I’m doing the same thing.
So what can you do with dreadful books.
First you can ask What’s going on?. The books are bad and as Holly Jr notes in his introduce they’re not very convincing. Readers are often “undecided about alternative archaeological explanations.” Yet they sell, so there’s clearly a market for poor quality books about the past. A hint at why this might be the case is in Stephen H. Lekson’s book review. He notes:
Robert Bauval, Michael Cremo, and Graham Hancock sell more books than we: by “we” I mean every archaeologist whose name is not Brian Fagan.
Might it be a good idea to ask why Brian Fagan can sell books when others don’t?
Brian Fagan has an eye for a story with dramatic scale and personal impact. In particular he’s good at connecting long-term climate change with the human past. He’s able to bring out details, like how refitting flakes to one core showed how a flint-knapper was left-handed. Often what he writes is the history of humanity, but it’s also a history of you.
Another feature of Brian Fagan’s work is that you can read it. The writing of many archaeologists could qualify as cruel and unusual punishment if it ever had a print run over 250 copies. Sometimes that’s justified. There are reports where complex technical terms are justified, and these wouldn’t be for public consumption anyway. They’re the fundamental blocks that more accessible works are built on. But equally there’s a strong tolerance of codswallop when it comes to writing in archaeology. It’s not just that some academics cannot write, but that they delight in their awfulness. Likewise there’s a lot of badly written pseudoarchaeology books. They don’t sell either.
Finally Brian Fagan’s books and pseudoarchaeologists in general are affordable and accessible. I’ve had to track down publishers in order to buy copies of specific books. Academic articles in a journal can easily be the price of two or three books. Some archaeologists are embracing open access, most impressively Internet Archaeology, but some journals like the American Journal of Archaeology have slipped back behind a paywall.
And this isn’t just current issues. If you want research that’s ten years old, twenty-five or fifty you’ll have to pay,[*] maybe thirty or forty pounds. Eric H. Cline says one author might be “laughing all the way to the bank”. In contrast in academic publishing the authors work for free and the publishers laugh all the way to the bank. I can’t see the ethical problem in the person who actually work the work earning some of the money. Though people are courted by publishers to publish with specific imprints for career gain, so I don’t see a huge difference in motives either.
Largely academic archaeologists haven’t shown much interest in the public collectively. There are certainly individuals with a strong commitment to public dissemination of their work, but in contrast the large bodies have pulled back from public accessibility. There is hope Holly Jr notes that the SAA meeting of 2012 said “perhaps we need to not only write for the public, but listen to them and address their interests and questions too.” This would be a step forward over complaining how bad the books the public likes are.
* Conflict of Interest here: I work for a company that puts out an Open Access journal, and another journal where papers are free to the public twelve months after publication. But if an archaeology journal can’t make papers published ten years ago freely accessible for fear of losing subscriptions, then maybe the question is why are they publishing research that academics don’t need to access?
